Nimble AMS

What do you like best?

Support staff is a big plus on a day to day basis. Support is a big issue especially when you are learning a new system. The Nimble 'app' built on Salesforce works great. Occassionally we come across a bug but Nimble is always right on top of it to get the fix out. Another PLUS.

Updates come 3 times a year right after Salesforce's. Nimble makes the updates easy, easier than any other system I've worked with. (But you are alway still beholding to Salesforce.)

I have worked with other AMSs before, the one feature I love is the Express Pay URL. What's so special? When your membership belongs to a company and employees are members by default, your main contact may be the company owner. If you send an electronic renewal invoice the owner, he/she will most likely pass that along to the A/P department - who is NOT going to create an account and log in and may not even be able to see the invoice directed at the owner. With Express Pay URL - you send the link to the owner, he/she forwards the email and ANYONE can pay the invoice online w/out logging in. All they need is an active credit card.

Nimble is always ready to hear how they can improve their product and with each release there is something that either works better or is new. They do not let their product get stale.

What do you dislike?

The person - account setting is fine, works great. But it does present challenges when you try to work with 3rd parties who 'integrate' with Salesforce. The person-account is something they need to understand and handle, which evidently is not common. You cannot 'create contacts' directly from an API, you have to let Salesforce create the person-account, which will automatically create the connected 'contact' object and be properly linked. This is Nimble's problem only because Nimble uses the person-accounts setting of Salesforce.

The basic Nimble license (based on a Salesforce PLATFORM license) does not include several objects that Salesforce itself might include if it were a regular Salesforce license. (Campaigns is one example). You may need to make sure you have the correct licenses for objects you will need.

When we first went live in 2017, Nimble didn't have a lot of hands on training for those who would be administering Nimble and Salesforce. I believe this may have improved since then. I wish they had short 'how-to' videos for super-users/admins. They have great documentation, but I am the "show-me" kind of learner.

Understanding that they are not the Salesforce guru for you & their best expertise is their own product - at the beginning, not being already a Salesforce guru myself, it was painful figuring out what was Salesforce and what was Nimble. I get it now, but not so much when I started.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

Our complex online join needed us to tweak the Community Hub, but is working great. We reduced all physical paper needed to be submitted in order to be considered as a member. We do not let anyone join automatically w/out a human review, but the process is so much better now.

The member web interface is almost out-of the box. It is easy now for our members to buy products, register for events, and edit their own data online.

The annual renewal is done with payments online using the Express URL featurer after the bulk renewals are run - No more mailing of renewal notices and hardly any checks have to be processed.

Easy way to manage committees, new events, and manage the relationships of people to companies and companies to companies in rosters.